InnercityABABABABABABAS (Blue Lion Child)

Innercity presents his catchily titled new record, ABABABABABABAS (Blue Lion Child), a dense and messy sound-wall that is ostensibly ambient, but practically a lot closer to noise. Textures all over the shop, generated with guitars and violins and put through big racks of something heavy. LP on Further Records.

REVIEWS

Chloe Harris’ Further Records introduces seasoned anti-musician Innercity’s latest LP, named after the key-smashed results of an angry encounter with an internet troll. The first word on the micro description on the sleeve is ‘uncompromising’; let the trauma commence.

A chamber ensemble of guitars and violins are scarred by torturous noise practices, taking the form of a harsh scald rather than the honest, pastoral tones usually associated with them. ‘Post apocalpytic’ - yeah, you could say that… Take for example the introductory tones of ‘Baal’s (Kitten Trumpeteer Choir)’, which could go either way after the high-pitched youthful parps of the ‘kittens’ (violins), but chooses to throw subtlety to the wind, take no prisoners, and pile on the distortion til the kittens screech. While side 1 is an exercise in pure minor abrasion, things get a bit more legible on the second side but equally as rough-hewn. A looped sample underpins most of ‘In Abra and Umbra’, allowing Hans Dens to introduce various extremities over the drone.

A similar, more frail version of this follows with even more space for variation, before the final brutal moments pound through walls of noise. It’s an interesting dark ambient LP that suffers a little from having only 1 flavour of noise, but is still a good example of altered instrumentation.